Songs of Dismantling: Standing as Witness in the 21st Century

Poets Randall Mann and  Fernando Pérez

read poetry and discuss the poetic experience as a method of cultural healing

moderated by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

A night of reading and discussion where “Standing as witness” is the over-riding theme. An exploration of the demonization and marginalization of the “other” in the U.S. What do we need to admit to ourselves to move beyond injustice and totalitarian impulses. What memes could be useful to us in spreading a message of inclusion. Poetry is explored as a vehicle to transform culture.

Fernando Pérez celebrates the release of a new book of poetry

A Song of Dismantling: Poems

published by University of New Mexico Press

In this dynamic debut collection, Fernando Pérez employs lyric and nonce forms to interrogate identity politics and piece together a complex family history. The book embodies fragmentation in form and story, exploring how migration affects relationships between people of different generations. Pérez invites readers on the journey as his family story unfolds over time and distance.

Randal Mann’s most current collection is titled:

Proprietary

published by Persea Press

Proprietary and critiques corporate culture, depicting (and slyly rebuking) the American materialism that erupted in the 1980s and has metastasized ever since. For years, Randall Mann has been hailed as one of contemporary American poetry’s most daring formalists, expertly using craft as a way of exploring racy subjects with trenchant wit and aplomb.

Fernando Pérez teaches at Bellevue College. His poems have been widely published in literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Más Tequila Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Hinchas de Poesia.

Randall Mann is the author of Complaint in the Garden (2004), which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the California Book Award; Straight Razor (2013), also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and Proprietary (2017). He is co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (2007). Mann received the 2013 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry. His most recent book is Proprietary: Poems,  published by Persea Press.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the 2014 recipient of the Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award in Nonfiction from the San Francisco Foundation. She has received awards and support from Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto, Djerassi Artist Residency, National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Currently, she is working on a memoir about her grandfather, a medicine man from Colombia who it was said could move clouds.